Tag: transgender

With all of the controversy surrounding the career of transgender MMA fighter Fallon Fox, it should come as little surprise that reporters have been asking athletes — regardless of their sexes — for their take on whether or not she should be allowed to fight. The latest fighter to voice his opinion on the controversial competitor is none other than UFC Heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez, who isn’t as open to the idea of allowing Fox to fight against other women as some of us are.

Like many people, Velasquez believes that Fox holds an unfair advantage over her competition, and should only be allowed to fight other transgender athletes. Via MMAFighting:

“I don’t think she should be able to fight women,” Velasquez flatly responded when asked about Fox at a recent media luncheon.

“Having the same bone structure and everything else as a man, I think definitely does give her an advantage.”

For those of you who don’t know, Fallon Fox happens to be a female fighter who was born a man. As you can probably infer from that sentence, there’s been a little controversy since then. Most recently, UFC announcer, professional comedian and…uh, podcaster (is that a thing?) Joe Rogan went on a rant about Fox. Rogan can be abrasive, but he’s an entertaining figure in the sport and generally inquisitive enough to question established narratives. He’s also subject to conspiratorial fancies from time to time, but no one’s ever claimed Rogan’s entirely sound of mind. But given his enthusiasm for the bizarre and his overall tolerance of homosexuality, his recent comments about this situation were rather disappointing. Let’s go through them piece by piece…

“She calls herself a woman but… I tend to disagree. And, uh, she, um… she used to be a man but now she has had, she’s a transgender which is (the) official term that means you’ve gone through it, right? And she wants to be able to fight women in MMA. I say no fucking way. I say if you had a dick at one point in time, you also have all the bone structure that comes with having a dick. You have bigger hands, you have bigger shoulder joints. You’re a fucking man. That’s a man, OK? You can’t have… that’s… I don’t care if you don’t have a dick any more…”

First off — Rogan’s simply incorrect here. If you’ve been on hormones for as long as Fox has, your bone structure does change. And while the hands of Fox might never be the same size as Kim Kardashian’s, that doesn’t matter. There’s a spectrum of physical discrepancy across female athletes, and the question isn’t whether Fox’s physique is larger than most, but whether it fits into that established paradigm. In this case, she does. But more than this, the problem with Rogan’s statements is his tone…

“You can’t fight women. That’s fucking crazy. I don’t know why she thinks that she’s going to be able to do that. If you want to be a woman in the bedroom and you know you want to play house and all of that other shit and you feel like you have, your body is really a woman’s body trapped inside a man’s frame and so you got a operation, that’s all good in the hood. But you can’t fight chicks. Get the fuck out of here. You’re out of your mind. You need to fight men, you know? Period. You need to fight men your size because you’re a man. You’re a man without a dick.

On Saturday, a female fighter named Fallon Fox scored a 39-second knockout against Ericka Newsome at CFA 10 in Coral Gables, Florida, extending her combined amateur/professional MMA record to 5-0, with all wins by first-round stoppage. This wouldn’t be particularly newsworthy, except for two reasons:

2) On her application for MMA licensure in Florida before the fight, Fox incorrectly claimed that she had been licensed by the California State Athletic Commission earlier this year. According to CSAC Executive Director Andy Foster, Fox’s application was still under review, and the CSAC had only mailed Fox a receipt for her initial $60 application. Fox claims that she didn’t intentionally misrepresent herself to the Florida commission, and believed she had been approved by California. At any rate, Fox didn’t disclose her transgender status on her Florida application because she wasn’t asked to, and none of this was revealed until after she KO’d Newsome with a knee to the face.